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I remember my mother bringing us 
to the British Museum in London.

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My mother's family was from Iraq.

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She brought us immediately 
to the Assyrian galleries

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and into the room that had 
the Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal.

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There's nothing cooler than being ten years old 
and learning that this is the first comic book

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and your people are responsible for it.

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She turned to us and she said,

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"What is it doing here?"

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Which made us keenly aware that

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these museums were not just 
these polite reliquaries

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for things that have been 
exchanged amongst cultures--

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that these were violently extracted.

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It was a museum, but it was also a crime palace.

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[Michael Rakowitz: Haunting the West]

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"The invisible enemy should not exist" is 
this on-going work that I began in 2006.

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In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq,

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eight-thousand-plus artifacts were 
looted from the National Museum of Iraq.

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I started to think about what it would mean 
for those artifacts to come back as ghosts

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to haunt Western museums.

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This project has unfortunately grown to include

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the archaeological sites that have 
been devastated by groups like ISIS.

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This installation is Room F in 
the northwest palace of Nimrud.

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When it was destroyed in 2015,

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it was holding two hundred reliefs.

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However, it originally had over 
six hundred of these reliefs.

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The majority of those reliefs 
were excavated in the mid-1800s

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and then sent to different Western institutions.

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The West assigns value on the 
objects from that part of the world

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but it's not at all symmetrical 
when you consider the way in which

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there's been this devaluation of the 
people that are from those places.

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The reliefs are situated in accordance 
with the original architectural footprint.

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What this project seeks to do is 
put the viewer into the position

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of an Iraqi inside that palace 
the day before ISIS destroyed it,

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and to show how much of their 
history they didn't have access to,

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and the gaps that they were forced 
to be looking at and looking through.

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These artifacts were also forcibly removed the 
way that my family was from my mother's homeland.

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My mother's family left Iraq in 1947

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as the result of the emergence of 
nationalist ideologies in the Middle East.

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The Iraqi Jews were kind of 
in an impossible situation.

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When they entered the U.S., there must have 
been all kinds of pressures to assimilate.

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Their assimilation story was not 
one where they gave everything up.

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My grandparents were like the first 
installation artists that I ever met.

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The house in Great Neck, Long Island,

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everything that was on the floor was from Iraq.

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Everything this was on the walls was from Iraq.

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And what was coming out of the 
kitchen was most definitely from Iraq.

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When I was in my senior year of high school,

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the first Gulf War happened 
in front of my brothers and I.

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My mother said to us,

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"Do you know there's no Iraqi 
restaurants in New York?"

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What she was pointing out was that Iraqi culture 
in the U.S. was not visible beyond oil and war.

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As we were approaching another Iraq war,

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I started a project that I could 
collaborate with my mother on.

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That became "Enemy Kitchen."

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My mother distributed our family's recipes

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and I would cook with these different groups.

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--Make a little crater,

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--and then you take a piece of the meat here,

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--put it in the center...

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"Enemy Kitchen" offered some kind 
of opposition to the way in which

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the war framed everything 
when we spoke about Iraq.

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I always talk about the one that happened 
in 2006 with a group of school kids.

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The schools that they were going to 
had forbade a lot of the teachers

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from speaking about the war directly in 
their classes because so many of them

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were connected to brothers and uncles--
and mothers and fathers--

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who were stationed in Iraq.

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It was so unbelievably violent that 
nobody ever thought to ask them

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what they thought of the war.

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Now "Enemy Kitchen" is a food truck 
that's staffed by Iraqi chefs.

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The sous chefs and servers 
are American combat veterans

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that served in Iraq.

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Those stories are now mobilized.

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The color schemes that my 
studio and I have chosen,

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it's a little bit like the 
color returning to the body.

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So there's a whole range of different 
materials that one sees represented.

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The anise tea bags have created the yellowish 
palette for the clothing of this "apkallu."

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This is one of my favorite colors.

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This orange is actually an 
orange that I grew up with:

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the outside packaging of an apricot paste.

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It was like the original Fruit Roll-Up.

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If a ghost is going to properly haunt,

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it has to appear differently than the 
entity appeared when it was living.

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These reliefs use the packaging 
of Middle Eastern food stuffs.

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Because of Homeland Security, for 
anything that is coming from Iraq,

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it would be too prohibitive 
for somebody to import it.

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A can of date syrup labeled 
as being "product of Lebanon"

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is actually processed in the Iraqi capital

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and then it's driven to Lebanon where 
it gets sold to the rest of the world.

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The object in the museum holds its value 
because it can tell you where it was from.

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The date syrup not being able to 
tell you where they were from,

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that was the skin that these 
artifacts should have to wear

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when they come back as ghosts.

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There's more than eight thousand 
artifacts that are still at large.

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Of those, we've made just a bit over nine hundred.

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This is a project that is going 
to outlive me and my studio.

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--Hey!

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--Salaam!

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[ASSISTANT] --How are you?

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[ALL LAUGH]

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[ASSISTANT]
--I prepped some wing spines at my house.

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[RAKOWITZ]
--Oh, that's beautiful, Denise!

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Once the studio went into lockdown 
as a result of the pandemic,

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I was very adamant about making sure that 
everybody in the studio was going to be okay.

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I wanted them to be able to continue to work.

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The assistants come for a visit every few weeks

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and they pick up more materials.

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--I'm currently working on this funerary bust.

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--I've just started working on an artifact 
that was originally from eastern Iraq.

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--This is a figure from Mesopotamia, 
specifically from the Khafaje region.

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In this moment where we've lost 
the close proximity to one another

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and we're making these lost objects,

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we still have these moments 
where we can locate one another

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and feel like we're not alone.

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When I was nominated in 2015 for 
the Fourth Plinth project in London,

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ISIS attacked Nineveh and Nimrud.

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The "lamassu" were basically reduced to pebbles.

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I recognized the fact that I was going to 
be working in public space on a pedestal--

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that this was the city of London,

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the heart of empire--

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and a very short walk away 
brings one to the British Museum,

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that I had visited with my mother decades before,

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where they have several "lamassu."

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The Tate Modern had reached out to me

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about the possibility of them 
serving as a custodian for this work.

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I did not want to somehow just repeat these 
imperial museums being seen as caretakers.

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I wanted the work to be 
shared by an Iraqi museum.

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It kept the problems of where 
something belongs alive.

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A diasporic sculpture with wings,

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moving between two places,

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representing the conditions of modern Iraqis,

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where there's no fixed place.

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If we're to have conversations about 
what decolonization truly looks like,

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it's accompanied by repair

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and it's accompanied by accountability.

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That work is actually something that's never done.